Introducing Spark: where SpikeReel's newest tools go live first

We kept finishing tools that did not belong in the middle of the studio. They are not part of clipping a long video, they are their own thing, and burying them behind a menu meant most people never found out they existed. So they have their own place now: Spark, at spark.spikereel.com, where the newest SpikeReel tools go live first. You sign in with the same account, and everything you make there lands in your normal projects.

AI Expand: a wide video, made vertical, without cropping

The usual way to get a vertical clip out of a 16:9 recording is to crop it, which throws away most of the frame and often half of whoever is talking. AI Expand does the opposite: it keeps the whole original frame and paints the missing picture above and below it, shot by shot, so the result fills a phone screen with nothing cut off. It reads the cuts in your clip and paints each shot separately, so a change of scene does not drag the wrong background with it.

It works to 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 and 16:9, on clips up to 90 seconds, and it costs 10 credits.

Viral Presets: your speaker, in a designed look

Pick a look and Viral Presets cuts your speaker out of their background and places them inside it: comic panels, a breaking-news package, a neon grid, a paper cutout, twenty-seven of them. The spoken words animate in that look's own style, and reaction stickers appear where they fit what is being said, in the language the clip is actually spoken in.

It works best on one person talking to camera in decent light, on clips up to 60 seconds, and it costs 20 credits.

One credit is one minute

SpikeReel used to meter two things separately: minutes for clipping and credits for everything else. You had to keep both in your head, and a spare credit could not pay for a minute of clipping. Now there is one pot. A credit is a minute of video processing, every plan carries a single allowance, and it pays for clipping and the tools alike. Nobody lost anything in the change: each plan's new number is at least its old minutes plus its old credits.

Unused credits now carry into the next month as well, up to one month's worth, so a quiet month is not simply lost.

How to get there

• Open Spark from the rail in the studio, or go to spark.spikereel.com directly.
• Upload a clip, or pick one you have already made from your Studio.
• The result arrives as its own project, ready to download, schedule or publish like any other clip.

Viral Presets is open to everyone, including free accounts. AI Expand is on the paid plans. More tools will land on Spark before they land anywhere else.